‘Writing Frame’ EAL Strategy: Explanation and Rationale

Working memory is limited. For everyone. To roughly seven pieces of information, plus or minus two.

Our EAL learners experience the same limitation as everyone else.

The key difference is that they have less stored securely in their long-term memory around English language use.

Meaning that, when they come to write, greater demands are placed on their working memory than is the case for many of their peers.

Any piece of work over a paragraph in length requires the writer to conceive of both the individual item and the whole of which it is to become a part.

A sentence is formed in the context of a paragraph, which itself is formed in the context of a story, an essay or some other overarching structure.

For writing to be good, there must be coherence. At all levels.

The degree of this coherence can vary, but it must, at the least, be reasonably strong.

For writers like our EAL learners, who may have relatively limited experience writing in English, simultaneously attending to the immediate and the overarching is complicated by their need to think more actively about the process of writing itself, including the very articulation of that which is in their minds, the synthesis of internal thought into written communication.

It will take time and effort for them to write their thoughts down in a manner that is clear and accurate.

This is not to say they won’t be able to do it, but the time and effort they exert will pull their minds away from considerations of coherency in relation to the text as a whole.

Mastering the basics comes first.

In practice, this means that extended writing is more difficult for EAL learners.

Writing frames can improve the situation.

They give learners a structure. Removing many of the decisions around coherency that normally need to be made.

A writing frame is a tool that does some of the work for the learner.

A scaffold that helps them do more than would otherwise be the case.

Here are three examples of what that looks like in practice.

‘Writing Frame’ Example One

Provide your EAL learners with a series of sentence starters covering each paragraph they will need to write.

For example, if the task is to write a weather report, then the sentence starters could be:

• Welcome to the weather report …
• The weather today has been …
• Yesterday, the weather was …
• We expect that tomorrow …
• Our next report will be …

In this example we can see how the sentence starters make clear what the overall structure will be, as well as what each paragraph should contain.

It’s important to note that this isn’t just about supporting the learner through the provision of the sentence starters.

By providing them in combination, we remove the need for the learner to think about structure.

Instead, they can focus their efforts on the act of writing, safe in the knowledge that the structure has been taken care of.

At the same time, learners are learning the structure through being exposed to it and because they are writing within it.

When adapting this model for your own use, you will need to consider what you are studying, what writing you want your EAL learners to do, and the current level of their English language development.

‘Writing Frame’ Example Two

Outline how many paragraphs you would like learners to write and what each paragraph should be about.

For example:

‘What is your life story?’

To answer this question, you should write five paragraphs.

• Paragraph One: Who you are and where you come from.
• Paragraph Two: All about your family.
• Paragraph Three: What are your hobbies and what do you like to do in your spare time?
• Paragraph Four: What do you want to do in the future?
• Paragraph Five: What is your most memorable experience?

A writing frame like this lets learners concentrate on writing each paragraph in turn.

It breaks the question down into a series of simpler questions or tasks, the answers to which come together to create a whole.

Learners know that by dealing with each of the sub-questions or tasks, they will answer the overall question.

For more skilled English users, this might not be necessary.

But for your EAL learners, this frame gives them confidence that by focussing on the separate elements, they can successfully complete the overarching task.

‘Writing Frame’ Example Three

Introduce your EAL learners to generic writing frames.

A generic writing frame is a frame you can use repeatedly for a specific type of writing.

For example:

• An essay-writing frame
• A story-writing frame
• A report-writing frame
• A frame for writing up science experiments
• A frame for writing newspaper articles

Here is an example for essay writing:

• First Paragraph
  • Introduction: In this essay I am going to…
• Second Paragraph
  • The first thing you think: My first point is that…
• Third Paragraph
  • The second thing you think: I also believe…
• Fourth Paragraph
  • A different point of view: Others would suggest…
• Fifth Paragraph
  • Conclusion: Overall, I think that…

The writing frame directs learners as to what they must do to meet the demands of essay writing (which is a specific genre of writing they must master).

You can use genre-specific writing frames repeatedly.

They act as a scaffold for your EAL learners.

Repeated use helps them to internalise the structure that the frame provides, meaning they improve their understanding of effective writing over the long-term.